3 Conquering Mac Word You either love it or you hate it, but you can’t get away from Microsoft Word, even on a Mac! This chapters goes through all recent versions of Word and how they work with PrintMath. 3.1 The Re-Editable Math Expression The dream of the math expression in Word has been: double-click on the expression, and the expression becomes editable; change something, click off, and the expression is updated, magically. Word Processing Mode Equation Editing Mode Of course, the real dream of working with math expressions is that the Word processor and the math expression maker are one in the same: you don’t leave the word processing program at all to make your math expressions. This is, however, a daunting dream to realize. It is like saying you should have the power of Photoshop inside of Word to manipulate images; there is only so much a word processor can do before it hands back to a specialized tool like Photoshop which is dedicated to image manipulation. OLE - Object Linking and Embedding - on the Windows side, fullfills the dream, with some limitations. But the Windows solution is not cross-platform: any OLE MS Word .doc or .docx files brought over from Windows to Macintosh lose their OLE-ness. In fact, they become quite unfunctional indeed. The Macintosh version of Microsoft Word has a pseudo-OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) feature that uses Apple Events to mimick the § 3.1 The Re-Editable Math Expression OLE “edit in place” functionality for its built-in Equation Editor (EE), which is the free version of MathType (MT). If you only need a few equations, and you are not too picky, then stick with the free version of Equation Editor. Don’t race out and buy MathType unless you really really need it! Once you install MathType on your Mac, it overwrites the stock (free) Equation Editor, and then you may be in for some fun as new versions of Microsoft Word & Office appear, and then don’t work with MathType. Copy your Applications folder over to a new Mac, or install a new hard drive? Gooooooood luck to ya! Everytime I have installed MathType, then sure enough, when something like this changes on my install disk, I have tremendous trouble trying to get MathType to start working again, and if I try to open up Word documents that have MathType equations embedded, then the recursive error messages are quite annoying indeed. Don’t get me wrong. MathType is very slick with its mountains of Word Scripts that automatically vertically center an expression based upon every conceivable situation. If you use Word in a workplace, this script usage might be problematic as many workplaces have Word Scripting turned off for security and anti-virus reasons. Personally, I think it is just easier and more refined to do the placement of the images myself, manually. Then I have the control that I want, and the images go in exactly as I wish, without having to fight a placement script that thinks it knows better. Unfortunately, this Mac psuedo-OLE feature is locked into only being available to the MathType/Equation Editor app. Just another in a long string of examples of how Microsoft does not play well with others. Even without OLE, we can still get our more beautiful PrintMath expressions into Microsoft Word, with a minimal amount of extra work, and, I believe, more control than the MathType/EE option. As for the quality of output, that is the real question. If you like MathType’s output, then stick with it. But perhaps this very simple © 1999-2016 MathMonkeys, LLC. © 1999-2016 Robert R. Curtis The PrintMath Book Page 68 comparison of quality makes you think: If you like PrintMath’s output better than MathType/EE, you will be willing to go the extra mile to get the higher quality output. Over the past 20 years, Word has changed drastically. To understand the whole Word story and how we need to work with it, some background information is required, as well as some history. 3.2 Mac Image File Formats In general, there are two general types of image formats: • Bitmaps Bitmap images are pixel-based images. All GIF, JPG, and PNG images are pixel-based. When you zoom-in on a bitmap, the image will “get fuzzy” due to a limi- tation of resolution quality. Nowadays, it is common (thank you iPhone) to have very high resolution bitmap images (like iPhone photos) that have astonishingly high resolutions, and large filesizes. It is no uncommon for a new iPhone to take a 10-25 megabyte (MB) photo! Simple Example: a circle in a bitmap image is a collec- tion of pixels that are in the shape of a circle. © 1999-2016 MathMonkeys, LLC. All rights reserved. Some rights a bit wild. § 3.2 Mac Image File Formats • Vector Vector images are drawn from text-based drawing com- mands. Example formats are PostScript, PDF, and SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Vector images do not suffer from “fuzziness” if you zoom-in (or out) on them - they have “infinite high resolution” as they are not “painted”. When a software program draws a vector based file, it then interprets various conditions to gener- ate an image, but if these conditions change, the image is regenerated, so a vector image “always looks nice”. Simple Example: a circle is a command like: circle 3.4 1.2 5.33 1.0 which might mean “draw a circle centered at (3.4, 1.2) of radius 5.33 with stroke size 1.0”. On the Mac, the original graphic file format was PICT, which stood for, of course, “Picture”. PICT is both a vector and bitmap format. Unfortunately, the vector side of PICT has only a limited vector drawing primitive set - likes Lines and Circles and shadings - but lacks the most important drawing primitive for truly beautiful rendering: Bézier curves. You can insert bitmap images inside of the PICT container. So if you have a PICT file, you might have some vector image commands, and some bitmap pieces, which will not scale well. As a result, PICT’s vector images are rudimentary and don’t look very nice, and they are limited to the natural Mac resolution of 72dpi (dots per inch). To add further insult to injury, the PICT images do not interchange with other operating systems like Windows nor iOS nor Linux. When Apple moved from OS9 to OSX, Steve Jobs knew he had to embrace a more modern core drawing format. The ubiquitous vector drawing format is Postscript. Even 40 years © 1999-2016 MathMonkeys, LLC. © 1999-2016 Robert R. Curtis The PrintMath Book Page 70 after its creation by Adobe, it continues to be the print standard. If you have something in PostScript format, your output will look beautiful at any resolution, and print beautifully as expected - if you have a PostScript printer, that is. At least the vector portions will be beautiful: PostScript, too, can have clunky bitmaps inserted into its vector drawing commands. Here is an integral made in PrintMath, showing the 3 different levels of Mac image beauty: γ θ α β PICT Bitmap PostScript Hopefully you may see the visual differences, especially on the integral sign: the PICT is clunky and jagged, the Bitmap is smoother, but still a bit jagged, and the PostScript is ... amazing - the curved integral ends, the fineness of the circle through the integral sign, the crispness of the greek letters. If all three of these images “just look like the same integral to you”, then you will not be interested in doing the little extra bit of work to get your expressions into PostScript beauty. Probably you should plan to use the Bitmap images and be plenty happy. But likely you are drawn to PrintMath because you appreciate the higher quality images in PostScript that PrintMath is capable of creating for you in your Word documents. So why didn’t Apple just use PostScript as their native drawing format? Well, after a number of years, they did. PDF – Portable Document Format – is a little sibling of PostScript. PDF can be thought of as “super simplified PostScript”.1 When Apple 1 If you open up a PDF file and look at it, you might think at first that it is actually a binary format, like PNG or GIF or JPG. In actuality, PDF is broken up into blocks just like © 1999-2016 MathMonkeys, LLC. All rights reserved. Some rights a bit wild. § 3.2 Mac Image File Formats switched from OS9 to OSX, Apple also changed its native drawing format from PICT to PDF. But before PDF became the core drawing standard, the folks at Apple knew they had to give developers some way to overcome the clunky PICT format: one of the big selling points of Mac computers were the beautiful output from (expensive) Apple LaserWriters. These first general usage PostScript printers did not like PICT either – they were driven by pure PostScript, and their output looked fantastic. Apple’s solution was a hack. In the PICT file format specification, there is a structure for text comments, known as PicComment. I suppose originally the idea was some developer might put some comments into the PICT to do something like “Photo taken in New York”. Whatever is in PicComment does not get drawn, and other programs are supposed to leave these PicComments alone. The other bitmap images have these Comment fields as well for similar purposes. The idea from Apple was that for an image in the PICT format, a develper could inject higher quality PostScript into these hidden PicComments, creating the format PICT+PS.